How to Audit Your Competitor's Local SEO in Only 7 Minutes

Your law firm's local SEO audit should include a look at your competitor's SEO profiles early on. SEO is competitive—whether you do everything right or nothing right, your competition heavily influences where your practice ultimately ranks. As a law firm, you're always operating in a highly competitive online arena—whether your practice is located in New York City or North Dakota. Even if the other top law firms are not doing everything perfectly, you need to document what your up against as part of a Local SEO Audit.

Doing a competitor analysis early on will give you a frame of reference for everything you discover about your local SEO profile.

You don’t need to do a full-blown diagnostic on each competitor, but take a look at the following, and compare that data against your own:

• Google My Business (GMB) ranking for top keywords
• Organic rankings for top keywords
• Review quantity and quality
• Number of links
• Site Speed
• Social Stats

In most cases, you should be able to take a look through these items and develop a hypothesis on why your competitor is in the position they're in compared to your law firm.

According to Branding Company CEO Dan Branda, “When you're doing a Local SEO Audit yourself, you should go through the same processes for your competitors as you do when auditing your own law firm.”

It starts with checking their GMB listing (categories, images, etc). This is followed by a citation crawl using UberSuggest. We'll pull this into a sheet and manually check each link for accuracy, along with ensuring the NAP is consistent on their website.

Based on this we'll get a heartbeat for their overall citation accuracy, as well as the authority and relevancy of the listings. From our client and competitor analysis, we'll identify gaps in our client's citation profile, and look to ultimately submit their NAP to those directories, through bFound, as needed.

On the keyword side of this, we'll use a tool such as Rank Ranger to track ranking improvements within the local pack over time and use a combination of Google Analytics and GMB insights to uncover opportunities for local landing optimizations to increase rank and conversions.

Want Branding Company To Do It All For You?

Because 84% of searchers skip paid ads and click on organic results, Search Engine Optimization is the base of every package we offer at Branding Company.

We simply do not see a reliable, long-term digital marketing strategy that works without SEO. Your business needs to be on Page 1 of Google because 4 out of 5 consumers start the buying process online and 90% never see page 2. If you're not on page 1, you're losing customers to your competition.

To get started with Branding Company's SEO services, signup for a free needs assessment or simply request a 15-minute introductory meeting to discuss your company's online marketing needs.

Helpful Local SEO Tools

• BuiltWith